king her miserable.

It was not difficult to make that poor lady unhappy. She had a fixed
notion of what life should be for people who were "nice" and
"refined," and her days were a succession of regrets at the
shortcomings of her neighbors. She was in many ways an admirable
woman, but she seemed incapable of extending the conception of
gentility which a little Pennsylvania town had given her, and she
never caught a gleam of the real meaning of the life of which she was
a part. She wanted everything in the Bad Lands exactly as she had had
it at home. "Well," as Mrs. Roberts subsequently remarked, "she had
one time of it, I'm telling you, in those old rough days."

Mrs. Cummins was not the only neighbor who furnished amusement during
those spring days of 1885 to the boys at the Maltese Cross. The
Eatons' "dude ranch" had developed in a totally unexpected direction.
From being a headquarters for Easterners who wanted to hunt in a wild
country, it had become a kind of refuge to which wealthy and
distracted parents sent such of their offspring as were over-addicted
to strong drink. Why any parent should send a son to the Bad Lands
with the idea of putting him out of reach of temptation is beyond
comprehension. The Eatons did their part nobly and withheld
intoxicating drinks from their guests, but Bill Williams and the dozen
or more other saloon-keepers in Medora were under no compulsion to
follow their example. The "dudes" regularly came "back from town" with
all they could carry without and within; and the cowboys round about
swore solemnly that you couldn't put your hand in the crotch of any
tree within a hundred yards of the Eatons' ranch-house without coming
upon a bottle concealed by a dude being cured of "the drink."

The neighbors who were most remote from Roosevelt in point of space
continued to be closest in point of intimacy. The Langs were now well
established and Roosevelt missed no opportunity to visit with them for
an hour or a day, thinking nothing apparently of the eighty-mile ride
there and back in comparison with the prospect of an evening in good
company. The Langs were, in fact, excellent company. They knew books
and they knew also the graces of cultivated society. To visit with
them was to live for an hour or two in the quietude of an Old World
home, with all the Old World's refinements and the added tang of
bizarre surroundings; and even to one who was exuberantly glad to be a
cowboy, this had its m